All posts tagged: Contorno Urbano Foundation

Today we visit the newest installations by Spanish artists who are participating in the community mural project that invites many disciplines and approaches to the public sphere, the “12+1 Project” in Sant Vicenç dels Horts, a neighborhood of Barcelona. In its third year, Contorno Urbano occupies a unique position in the public art world that stays clear of commercialism – as well as Street Art and graffiti – although it borrows from both. Today we see two of the newest participants and their walls.

Marking a decade as a muralist, Gonzalo Martin (1992) aka Taquen is a Spanish visual artist and illustrator with a clean linear style that may remind you of embroidery or stained glass design. His new wall for the Contorno Urbano 2020 program features a pigeon gently cradled in two hands. It calls to mind the fragility of life, and of nature.

He says that much of his work reflects a dialogue between our natural environment and our social behaviors. It’s a delicate balance, this organic relationship between us and our earth – and Taquen subtly appears to remind us that the balance is in our hands.

“Equilibrium
is where I find the best way to integrate ourselves,” he says.
“Without
shocks, without exaggeration, leaving a camouflaged footprint that will become
part of that environment naturally, without destabilizing it.”

His creative partner on this outing is Barcelona born Sonja Ben, who is creating a brash and athletic counterpoint to this world of Taquen, popping with color. Performance comes to mind, seeing these animated figures punching forward like characters in a video game, avatars of aspiration and adventure.

Using symbols as actors, her work is representing the real world – in a child’s language; processing the travelogue of the inner explorer as seen through anime and saturated digital colorways.

Joan Tarragó paints his “Fight Plastic Portal” with
his “fusion of graphic language, ancient symbolism and surf influences,” he
says. The wrapping line-work its pulsating natural energy washes over you in
waves of turquoise and curving black lines. If these patterns look familiar you
may have seen his work on facades and skating courts in places like Miami, New
York, Japan, and Bali.

Ángel Toren elevates the “tag” of traditional graffiti writers as interpreted by theater posters and cinemas by employing optical play, geometric sharpness, crisp layers of color and dimension. The skills are so focused that you forget this is by hand, by can, by brush.

Toren says his work “focuses on the tri-dimensionality of space, depth and perspective as a dance in the composition.” His 2 and 3-D color plays have appeared as abstract and pop-informed graffiti stays true to his roots while pushing the boundaries of the accepted idea of a piece that was first defined by train writers.

The walls are part of an initiative from Contorno Urbano, a
community based public art effort which is beginning a new edition of their 12
+ 1 project in Sant Vinceç del Horts, featuring interventions on Rafael
Casanova’s street walls. The temporary installations ride two months, to be
replaced by a new duo.

Chilean born, Barcelona-based former graffiti writer Dr. Drë began on the streets in 1996 with aerosol and eventually experimented with oil, acrylic, and canvas. His murals and fine art have been exhibited in Chile, Latin American and Europe. He has an affinity for the technical, the fine line, volume, and perspective. His new mural draws upon his original fascination for graffiti, geometry, psychedelia and the letterform, bringing each to a more futuristic dimension.

A member of the artistic collective Reskate Arts & Crafts , graphic artist Minuskula (María López) is original from the Basque Country in Donostia-San Sebastián and has dedicated much of her work to illustration and letter-styling, with some experience in muralism as well. Here she translates an illustrated metaphor large scale, calling the piece “Limits”.

As illegal Street Art morphed into legal murals we began to witness the entry of formally trained artists and professionals who not only abandoned the politically charged or socially challenging themes in favor of pleasant topics and commercial aesthetics but accidentally launched an arms race for the biggest, tallest, widest walls possible.

Soon the descriptions we received about new artist works shifted from discussions on themes and messages to statistics about square meters covered, the number of stories high the building was, and how many cans or gallons of paint were required to finish it.

Spanish
artist, designer, and photographer Octavi Serra would like a larger wall
please. The one that Contorno Urbano gave him for their 11th mural
this year in Barcelona seems dreadfully small, and he has really big ideas. He
calls this mural “Insufficient”.

Serra
says his work often “focuses on capturing the irony, truisms and frustrations
of modern life,” and while this piece is evidently meant to be tongue in cheek,
he is tapping into a general sense of dissatisfaction that is part of a
materialistic culture, and part of the human condition.

By
letting the typography bleed off the edges, you also sense the claustrophobic
feelings that are playing with the artists mind. “There is this feeling of
never being completely satisfied even though reason argues that we should be,”
he says. “There is this desire to always have more, which make the road
impossible to enjoy.”

The
mural is part of the 12 + 1 public mural project of Barcelona – at the Civic
Center Cotxeres Borrell. Before the end of the year they are planning a
collective exhibition where works by all the artists who have participated in
the edition of the 12 + 1 2019 Barcelona project will be on display. The show
will feature artists Jay Visual, Ivan Floro, Margalef, Anna Taratiel, Nuria
Toll, Flavita Banana, Cristina Lina, Degon, Mr. Sis, Cristina Daura, Laia and
Octavi Serra.

“You must have rocks in your head if you think that you are going out with your friends dressed like that!” says your mom as you add more gel to your hair while pouring over every detail of your magnificence in the mirror. Honestly, your parents are so square.

“Rocks in your head” is an idiom meant to infer that someone
is thoroughly stupid, crazy, absurd — and with world news combined
with a firehose of entertainment and disinformation flooding you from every
direction today, sometimes you wonder about the thoughts, emotions, and
memories that you have to process inside your head just to remain “balanced”

That’s what artist Cristina Daura was thinking about when she created her new public art mural for the Contorno Urbano community mural program called 12+1 in Barcelona. She went to MICA in Baltimore for illustration, and spent a few years working in dead-end, unfulfilling jobs until she struck out on her own drawing comics and illustrating about things that interest her most for music and publishing clients.

“Her artwork plays
with the mind, using primary colors in harsh, punk and somehow macabre
illustrations, where decapitated or faceless people are often protagonists,”
says Contorno Urbano in a recent email.

“As if it were
an x-ray, the artist has represented a head full of things, thoughts, and emotions.
On the one hand, the flowers symbolize the illusion and the deepest dreams of
human beings. On the other, the rocks are destructive and cause a
transformation.”

The community-based Contorno Urbano continues to provide opportunities to local and visiting artists to access public space for their explorations on walls in a suburb of Barcelona. Not necessarily from the graffiti or Street Art world, they none the less are examining the practice of putting your stuff up to a general audience of passersby. Today we bring you some shots of their textile-influenced Midsomer walls with Alessia Innocenti from Chile and Mariadela Araujo who is originally from Caracas.

Ms. Araujo studied fine arts and painting and spent much of her early career teaching children and adults. Here she’s still working collaboratively to install a grouping of geometric shapes of yarns that take their influence from fractals and studies of symmetry.

Ms. Innocenti presents a study for a new textile pattern she has created- a repeating pattern of subtle shading that has similarities to sixties optic art. Having completed projects of embroidery on a large scale in Caracas, Rome and Helsinki, here she presents a piece of embroidery in large format as a mural, in all of its chromatic variations.

BSA Special Feature: VHILS “Debris” Sets Macau in Golden Nostalgia

Is
anybody listening?

Last year Vhils published this film about communication – personal, intimate, and global. We waited a year to see if it felt equally timeless as the first time we viewed it and indeed it is. Some stories like these have an additional element that secures their status. Surrounding the portraits created by the Portuguese Street Artist in Macau, this collage of images, interactions, flashes of expression and sequences of behavior is accompanied by a linear/circular narration that attempts to reconnect to a personal history while chiding the narrators own behavior.

It’s a winsome recounting of memories that are shared globally; a communal and personal experience at once told with clarity and emotional nostalgia, written and directed by José Pando Lucas.

OKUDA: The International Church Of Cannabis

One would hope that the International Church of Cannibis would look like this! Owing perhaps to psychedelic art of 1960s counterculture, liquid light art, concert posters, murals, underground newspapers, and of course kaleidoscoping the world with new eyes, the Spanish Street Artists Okuda San Miguel transformed this internal architecture into a truly holy space. Denver is one of those American cities that still has a good economy thanks to Colorado’s low taxes, growing marijuana industry and soaring real estate market. It seems like the whole city has invited many Street Artists to transform street space over the last decade and with a good collector’s base, the art galleries are busy and special projects are popping up everywhere to show off the skillz.

With a new church that uses pot as a sacrament, this project is spearheaded by Steve Berke, who’s Wikipedia posting lists him as “two-time candidate for mayor of Miami Beach, cannabis activist, rapper, YouTuber, entrepreneur, and former All-American tennis player.” Dude, just gaze at the ceilings here and you realize that the possibilities are awesome.

“Artist Mr. Sis is in Barcelona painting this pair of full figured females going in for the kiss on this billboard for Contorno Urbano,” we wrote a few weeks ago in a posting about this wall. Today we have the finished video.

A new mini-doc from the
Parees Festival in Oviedo, Spain has just been released about the 2018 edition.
It features on-screen interviews with many of the artists who were involved,
including Colectivo Licuado, Roc BlackBlock, Taquen, Xav, Andrea Ravo Mattoni,
Kruella d’Enfer, Alfalfa y Twee Muizen.

They don’t call it World Pride for nothing, and many artists are creating new public artworks this month to commemorate the 5oth anniversary of the modern rights movement for LBGTQ+ people in many cities.

Artist Mr. Sis is in Barcelona painting this pair of full figured females
going in for the kiss on this billboard for Contorno Urbano. The community
powered initiative invites all manner of artists to participate and this
illustrator who also is formally trained in dance and theater is gratified to
have the opportunity to create a public painting. He calls this “Sol Un Beso”
or “Just a Kiss”.

As we recognize that not everyone around the world has the freedom to love who they want, in fact face violence and threats from state and civil entities, Mr. Sis says he would really love it if people use his new hashtag #SoloUnBeso.

BSA Special Feature: Non-Trivial – Jesse Hazelip

“People think ‘Oh, prison is for people that are bad.’ That’s
not the case. It’s a racist system. We need to raise the awareness on that.,”
says graffiti writer, street artist and fine artist Jesse Hazelip in this new
video.

In addition to speaking about his technique of engraving
animal skulls, he speaks about the US justice system of incarceration that he
compares to a “mass epidemic that is affecting marginalized people, mainly people
of color who are black and brown.”

Preach!

Banksy Overlooked in Venice

The Street Artist Banksy posted this video to cry crocodile tears on his Instagram during the Venice Biennale. “Despite being the largest and most prestigious art event in the world, for some reason I’ve never been invited.” Is the large seafaring vessel spread over multiple canvasses a self portrait, perhaps? It’s simply massive.

“There’s never really a blank canvass moment in my process.
There is a constant cycle of paintings that are at very stages of completion”

“ I guess I see these as just one long continuous painting”

And so we end our excepts from the dramatic reading.

Thumbs up to visual effects editor Mike Gaynor.

Gonzalo Borondo MERCI. Teaser #2

Spanish Street Artist and installation artist Borondo is taking over a church, bringing the cathedral qualities of the dark forest with him. His teasers for this project (culminating as “Merci” on June 21) are as illuminating as they are elusive.

“The church has been closed for 30 years,” we wrote this week. “If you wait long enough the natural world will overtake this temple, covering it with moss, wrapping it with ivy, filling it with trees. “

The artistic duo just brought two new pop culture inspired billboards last week to this small town in Catalonia to entertain you with their hybrid brand of graffiti, video games, and sports references. Like many today they’re using the free association split-attention style of memes and the Internet that is now our lingua franca – or should we say linqua españa

At the
intersection of graffiti, the Internet, and cute things, Imon Boy has developed
a fun-centric database of pop-cultre references merged and interplayed in
scenarios from many a ‘00s teen memories surfing YouTube and catching tags –
and showing his work in a gallery setting in Munich, Hamburg, Phillipines,
Miami, Sydney, and New York. He says this game is typical of writers and cops –
but it looks a lot more fun from this perspective.

A
native of Badalona (Barcelona), Dagoe is similarly well travelled
geographically as well, taking his illustration, design, and animation powers
to France, Tunisia, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Here he namedrops Cope
and references Tupac and Drake – with the sensitive Canadian rapper wearing a FC
Barcelona team shirt and crying into a phone – that’s a mashup, bro.

The 1990s lo-tech graphics of glitches and gifs and simplistic digitized objects continue to find their way into Street Art and murals, including this new app-activated chromo-keyed mural by Vic-born Degon.

A part-time post-rapper and a co-founder of his own graphics studio for creating beautiful-ugly logos, Degon says he began his first forays into graffiti in ’99, eventually becoming a bonafide crew member of the NGFX.

Now his interventions are straddling the physical and the digital and to enjoy fully this new “Green Screen Art” for the 12+1 project in Barcelona you’ll need a phone to see the motion graphics that are triggered. Or you can just look at the animation posted here at the end.

Official kick-of for release of the book “Get up again: Forty years later” by Craig Castleman

Nearly Forty years after his seminal book “Getting Up: Subway Graffiti In New York” was released, Craig Castleman is touring Spain to talk about a huge update to the story. Originally published by MIT press, it became a cult book for the graffiti/street art subculture and a bibliographic reference in the academic field.

”When the city designed the subway system they made some bad choices on colors. … If the subways were painted nice, it would make a lot of people very happy,” graffiti writer LEE is quoted from this book in the New York Times review of this 1982 release by the teacher, who had been at the High School of Art and Design, presumably with many of the young artists he researches.

An early academic record of the lively and controversial New York graffiti scene that thrilled and flummoxed the city during the previous decade, Castleman featured interviews and observations by important foundational names like Bama, Tracy 168, Phase 2, Futura 2000, and Iz the Wiz at a time when few valued their opinions.

This month, as a result of a joint initiative by INDAGE, the Spanish Association of researchers and disseminators of graffiti and urban art, and Contorno Urbano Foundation, Castleman’s visionary study is going on tour for a series of lectures and round tables in cities including Hospitalet, Barcelona, ​​Valencia, Malaga, Granada and Madrid.

The events focus on the important contributions of the author and academic to the canon of early graffiti history. In addition he’ll be promoting an expanded volume that builds on that highly valued original book entitled “Get up again: Forty years later”. It features 160 previously unpublished photographs from the golden age of New York graffiti, a phenomenon many say Castleman first helped define and globalize.